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Quick note about x64 Tail call

A coworker on the CLR dropped by recently, having hit a brick wall about some problem he was having with some ASM code for x64 that was trying to tail call.  He has already grep’ed through the ABI docs, and had actually hit this blog prior to knocking Read More...
Posted Monday, February 09, 2009 11:28 AM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments

What's in a title?

My wife just asked "What's an 'after-sales engineer'?" I parsed the terms, and came up with "Tech Support Dude". As a teenager, I was a Foliage Architect (I mowed lawns), System Builder (computer assembly slave), Network Administrator (very poorly paid, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 1:50 PM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments

The customer is wrong

I just watched the highly lame “You wouldn’t steal a car…Downloading pirated movies is stealing ” ‘trailer’. How’s this for irony: I watched this trailer because it was the SECOND thing to play on the DVD of Die Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 02, 2008 9:45 PM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments

Turning off comments for a while...

The spam bots have been causing me all sorts of trouble - I had over 1000 messages informing me that some spam has been deleted over the weekend. I'm going to kill comments, and hope that in a few months, (after I get a chance to write up something of Read More...
Posted Monday, February 18, 2008 11:31 AM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments

Vista x64 Media Center 'fix'

<RETRACTION> Crap. After getting a couple of comments saying they tried the same thing, and it didn't work for them, I went back and tried it myself. And it turns out it doesn't work. I think I had tried it with some media that I had already transcoded Read More...
Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 9:52 AM by Kevin Frei | 5 Comments

How not to benchmark different languages

I've recently been trolling the web for any sort of language-comparision benchmarks, to see how the CLR's JIT stacks up to the competition. Dr. Dobbs has what seemed to be a pretty reasonable micro-benchmark article . It's not particularly insightful, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 12:41 PM by Kevin Frei | 7 Comments

Boost 1.34.0 and how to get it to build for AMD64...

I've recently been deluged by a pile of new electronic gadgets* so that I haven't had time to do much coding. So I was looking around yesterday and found that there's (finally) a new version of Boost available. I was actually underwhelmed by the lack Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 8:37 PM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments

How to use RtlUnwindEx

Disclaimer: I've never actually written an unwind personality routine, so take what's here with a grain of salt. A few days back, I spent 30 minutes defending the C++ runtime's exception handling personality routine to the guy that has the less than enviable Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 8:24 AM by Kevin Frei | 1 Comments
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AMD64 unwind info gotchas

I had a brief e-mail exchange with one of the devs on the optimizer team about a checkin he put up for review. He modified the compiler so that it only aligns the stack for functions that call other functions - that's the typical definition in compiler Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 10:34 AM by Kevin Frei | 1 Comments

New Job, SP1

I recently switched from the lead of the Code Gen & Tools team for Visual C++ to the lead for the Code Gen team for the .Net Framework. I've not used managed code much, but for some classes of code, it sure does look easier to use [I'm working on Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 19, 2006 9:42 AM by Kevin Frei | 3 Comments
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Speaking in 'public'...

I'll be hanging out with the cool kids at the Northwest C++ Users Group tomorrow night. If you're in the area, and want to heckle me, swing by. We'll be in building 40 at 6:30 PM. My talk starts at 7:00 PM. I'm talking about the actual runtime cost of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:35 PM by Kevin Frei | 4 Comments

Bug in x86 inline assembly to watch out for

Imagine this very lame code: int main() {} void BugAsm() { __asm { MOV [ESP+12],OFFSET main } } void(*BugAsmPt)()=&BugAsm; // this is just to make sure the function is not removed by /OPT:REF Now imagine your significantly less lame code doing something Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 1:53 PM by Kevin Frei | 2 Comments
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A more flexible array template [and the evolution of the idea]

{Disclaimer - I started with a bunch of code from boost::array - it's a great implementation of the functionality it provides} While my day job doesn't generally allow me to goof around with advanced C++ features, I still managed to find time to do so Read More...
Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 2:17 PM by Kevin Frei | 4 Comments
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ML64 bug to watch out for

If you're porting your application to x64, and you use much in the way of __asm in your x86 code, you're likely to start looking at ml64 - the 64 bit version of Masm. The reason you're likely to do this is that the x64 compiler doesn't support __asm blocks Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:45 PM by Kevin Frei | 0 Comments
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Visual C++ Code Gen & Tools bugs

My role for the past 6 months (and the next several) I'm charged with effectively "going down with the ship" WRT the current generation of code gen & tools for Visual C++. This includes the linker, Masm, ml64, DIA, c2, pdb, and a few other miscellaneous Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:22 PM by Kevin Frei | 2 Comments
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